Raising the Bar, Matthew Kolodziej at William Busta Gallery

Raising the Bar

Matthew Kolodziej at William Busta Gallery

Come to think of it, Cheez Whiz, Stadium Mustard, squeeze-bottle ketchup and the

whole

sloppy vernacular of fast food adornments have always had fine arts potential.

But Matthew

Kolodziej makes the most of such extrusions. In his show Caught in Flux

the University of

Akron Assistant Professor invents a sizzling range of acrylic squiggles

and puddles that sit on

the surface of his canvases like condiments on a burger. That

said, in Kolodziej’s hands the

vivid, complex end results are definitely not McPaintings.

Kolodziej projects photos of construction sites, or sometimes a montage of such views,

large canvases and goes to work with a marker, reproducing the maze of hard-to-

pin-down

structural incidents in purple or blue or orange tones. Then he builds a 3D

layer of clear gel

medium partitions on top of them. When that dries, the more

painstaking process of drizzling

thinned paint into some of the little cells he’s created

gets under way. Some passages are

reminiscent of enamel work, or like a kind of slap-

happy, plastic-fantastic cloissonnism. But

the overall range of reference in these highly

dramatic views reaches backward in time

through abstract expressionist works by

Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning to the origins

of Western landscape painting.

Most of Kolodziej’s compositions at Busta’s take place either

in an encircling concave

space or seemingly in mid-air, above a vast, panoramic, map-like

network of lines and

shapes. Both of these premises bring to mind classical architectural

themes and

structures celebrated in 16th or 17th century Italian painting – views of the

Colosseum

or the Roman Forum.

Restoration is a six-foot square work that resembles a shattered mosaic of orange,

umber

and ocher shards enlivened by very complicated passages of slim white

squiggles, as if it

were painted in part with spray-can confetti. Some of Kolodziej’s

paintings have recognizable

representational features, but most of Restoration defies

any simple visual resolution. It looks

more like an aerial view of a city than like a

construction site, sprouting taupe and gray

rectangles across its upper reaches like a

distant view of tall office buildings. As an

ambitious, essentially abstract painting with a

title that echoes like a trumpet across the fields

of art history, Restoration invites

comparison to Willem DeKooning’s 1950 masterpiece

Excavation. That painting has

been seen as an elegy for the wreck of Europe (and of

European art) following the

Second World War. It depicts a complex jumble of half-defined

shapes which organize

a tortured, chaotic space with their own harsh logic of dislocation.

Slapping on black

and white oil based enamel with energetic gestures, Dekooning filled his

work with

sound and fury and a deep pessimism about human affairs. A very existentialist

statement, it also seems in its dark way to assert the persistence of the individual and

the

validity of human response.

Kolodziej’s Restoration carries a different, though not necessarily opposite message.

As in all

of his recent works, overt references to the froth of contemporary artificiality

dominate his

expressive means, saying something about the layers of nonsense –

from repressive

mechanisms in the Freudian sense to the always incoming tide of post

modern consumerism

-- that conceal, control, or even motivate individual expression,

whether in art or elsewhere.

And yet there is an underlying sense of giddy freedom in

Restoration, and of some kind of

tricky authenticity. It’s genuinely exciting to look at,

for one thing, keeping the eye moving at

all times along a network of fractured streets

and avenues (or whatever), bumping through

curly white passages that look like

nothing so much as embellishments on a pre-schooler’s

lunch box. There’s even

something hopeful about the distribution of detail – how the small

stuff is mostly in the

bottom half, and the big things march slantwise into the picture plane,

down from the

top corners. It’s as if Kolodziej is saying the best is yet to come.

Compass is predominately blue and white, swirling upwards to a vortex near the upper

right

corner. The effect is of being inside a dome built of square blocks, like a study of

the interior

of the Pantheon in Rome. Ladder-like objects and snatches of blue and

gray lines form

dense areas of construction site detail and are crammed into the lower

right quarter of the

canvas, as if driven there by centrifugal force. The painting seems

to describe worlds in

collision, as if the sky had crashed into the earth, or at least had

descended close enough to

be reached by a ladder.

The ladder or giant crane theme arises naturally from construction/demolition imagery

and

Kolodziej uses it as a central device in several paintings at Caught in Flux. For

Synapse he

has constructed a crazy quilt of yellow and green, accented with umbers

and burnt orange,

floating above the raw-looking canvas. Between these open

patches of clear acrylic medium-

coated cloth surface and the network of little puddles

of color, the painting has nearly the

effect of a bas-relief: the eye is drawn in and

driven back with a double motion.

A number of ladder-ish shapes are strewn through Synapse, but the main one runs

right up

the middle, veering just a little to the right. It appears and disappears,

embedded in the

camouflage of Kolodziej’s technique, offering a passage straight out

of the painting. Whether

there’s anywhere to go may be another question for another

series of paintings, but most of

the works at Busta’s seem to prop open the space they

occupy, lifting the lid on process as

they gaze frankly at the mediums they employ,

inviting a new freedom into the age-old

dialogue of color and imagery.

[Cleveland Free Times 11/14/07]

Matthew Kolodziej, 2008
acrylic on canvas